Professional Documents
Culture Documents
M I C H A E L LOWY
Centre Natlonal de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the
professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together . . . . ,,1 This
opinion appears in an article published by Marx in the N e w York Daily
Tribune in August 1854. In this same year appeared Dickens's b o o k Hard
Times, which contains an unusually articulate expression of the Romantic
criticism of industrial society. This b o o k does not pay such explicit hom-
age to pre-capitalist (generaly medieval) forms of life as so m a n y other En-
glish Romantics - such as Burke, Coleridge, Cobbet, Walter Scott,
Carlyle (to whom Hard Times was dedicated), Ruskin, and William Mor-
ris - but the reference to past moral and religious values is an essential
component of his cast of mind.
In Hard Times the quantifying and cold spirit of the industrial age is mag-
nificently portrayed in a mill owner and Utilitarian Member of Parliament,
" T h o m a s Gradgrind," a man who is always "with a rule and a pair of scales
and the multiplication table.., in his pocket," and always "ready to
weigh and measure any parcel of h u m a n nature, and tell you exactly
what it comes to." For Gradgrind everything "is a mere question of
figures, a case of simple arithmetic" and he sternly organizes the education
of children around the sound principle that "what you couldn't state in
figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable
in the dearest, was not, and never should be." Gradgrind's philosophy -
the harsh worldview of Political Economy, strict Utilitarianism and classi-
cal laissezfaire - was that "everything was to be paid for. N o b o d y was
ever . . . to ... render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to
be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch
of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain
across the counter.'2
But Hard Times is not only about the grinding of the soul: it tells also
894
It is in this general context that the problem of work in the modern capital-
ist society is examined. Dickens does not focus his attention on the labor
process inside the factory, but he observes that the workers are bound to
follow the movement of the machine, the uniform rhythm of the steam-
engine, which moved "monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness.'6
Let us illustrate this kind of criticism with the writings of an author who
was very far from being a socialist (although he strongly influenced Wil-
liam Morris's socialist utopia): John Ruskin. Historian of architecture,
philosopher of the arts, a friend of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Ruskin
was also interested in political economy, and in the introduction to his
work A Joy for ever (1857) one can find a summary of his main ideas in
this area. For him, the industrial mode of production creates "a slavery
in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than
that of the scourged African or helot Greek," because it is a system of
labor that transforms human beings into "cog-wheels" and thoroughly
"un-humanizes" them. This "degradation of the operative into a ma-
chine," this destruction of his soul, his intelligence, and his freedom, is,
according to Ruskin, the worst evil of modern times. One of its main
sources is what he calls ironically "the great civilized invention of the divi-
sion of labor"; he complains that this invention has been given a false
name: "It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:
Divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and
crumbs of life . . . " . In modern industrial manufacturing work has lost
any human quality: the laborers do not have "the smallest occasion for
the use of any single human faculty"; they have been reduced to a uniform
quantity "to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with
its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes," an anonymous multitude
that "is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke."
One of the first authors to stress the parallel or affinity between the Marx-
ist and the Romantic opposition to the bourgeois rationalized world-view
was Karl Mannheim, in his brilliant essay on "Conservative Thought"
(1927). Mannheim showed very perceptively that the opposition of the
concrete against the abstract, of the dynamic (dialectical) against the stat-
ic, of totality against fragmentation, and of the collective against the in-
dividualist perception of history are common traits of the "rightist" and
the "leftist" criticism of the biirgerlich-naturrechtliche Denken. However,
most of the examples he gives of"the Marxist position are taken from
Luk~tcs's History and Class Consciousness, a work that is already a combi-
nation of Marxism and German neo-romantic sociology. Moreover,
Mannheim is more interested in the methodological similarities between
the revolutionary/Marxist and the conservative/Romantic styles of think-
ing than in the possible convergence of their concrete critique of industri-
al/bourgeois society, 11
ting them to its own strictly quantitative measure: "the quantity of money
becomes more and more its only powerful characteristic; as it reduces eve-
ry entity to its own abstraction, it reduces itself to its own movement as
a quantitative entity." The exchange between human qualities - love for
love, trust for trust - is replaced by the abstract exchange of money for
a commodity. The worker himself is reduced to the condition of commodi-
ty, the human-commodity (Menschenware), a wretched being "both phys-
ically and spiritually de-humanized (entmenschtes)," and forced to live
in modern caves that are worst than the primitive ones because they are
"poisoned by the pestilential breath of civilization." Just as a shopkeeper
who sells minerals "sees only their mercantile value, and not the beauty
and the particular nature of the stones," people in capitalist society lose
their material and spiritual senses and replace them by the exclusive sense
of possession. In a word, being,, freely expressing the richness of life
through social and cultural activities, is more and more sacrified for hav-
ing, the accumulation of money, wares, or capital.~4
These motifs of the youthful writings are less obvious in Capital, but they
are nevertheless present: in several passages Marx compares the ethos of
modern capitalist civilization, which is only interested in producing more
commodities, cheapening them, and accumulating capital - i.e. with
"quantity and exchange-value" - with the spirit of the classical antiquity
that holds "exclusively by quality and use-value.'15
H o w could this be achieved? One of the main documents for Marx's ideas
in this area is the Grundrisse (1857 - 1858). He suggests in this work that in
a socialist community technical progress and machinism will drastically
reduce the time of "necessary labor" - the labor required to satisfy the
basic needs of the community. Most of daily time will therefore be left
free for what he calls, following Fourier, travail attractif; i.e. truly free
labor, labor that is the self-realization of the individual. Such labor, such
900
Now, it would be utterly misleading to deduce from the above remarks that
Marx was a Romantic anti-capitalist: he drew as much - or rather more
- from the Enlightenment and classical Political Economy, than from the
Romantic critics of industrial civilization. In a very revealing passage from
The Manuscripts of 1844 he comments on the contradiction between the
old landowners and the new capitalists, expressed in the polemic between
Romantic authors (Justus M6ser, Sismondi) and political economists
(Ricardo, Mill): "this opposition is extremely bitter and each side tells the
truth about the other."18 In the same way, a recurring theme in his late
economic writings is that Sismondi is able to see the limits of Ricardo,
and vice-versa.
Marx's own view is neither Romantic nor Utilitarian, but the dialectical
Aufhebung of both in a new, critical, and revolutionary weltanschauung.
Neither apologetic of bourgeois civilization nor blind to its achievements,
he aims at a higher form of social organization, which would integrate
both the technical advances of modern society and some of the h u m a n
qualities of pre-capitalist communities - as well as opening a new and
boundless field for the development and enrichment of h u m a n life. A new
conception of labor as a free, non-alienated, and creative activity - as
against the dull and narrow toil of mechanical industrial work - is a cen-
tral feature of his socialist utopia.
After Marx's death, the dominant trend in Marxism has been the "moder-
nist" one; it took over only one side of the Marxian heritage and developed
an un-critical cult of technical progress, industrialism, machinism, For-
dism, and Taylorism. Stalinism, with its alienated productivism and its ob-
session with heavy industry, is the sad caricature of this kind of "cold
stream" in Marxism (to paraphrase Ernst Bloch).
But there exists also a "warm stream," whose radical and all-embracing
critique of modern civilization draws both on Marx and on the Romantic
anti-capitalist tradition. This kind of "Romantic Marxism" insists on the
essential break and discontinuity between the socialist utopia - as a
901
qualitatively different way of life and work - and the present industrial
society, and it looks with nostalgia toward certain pre-capitalist social or
cultural forms.
Like his friend John Ruskin, Morris considered art not as a luxury but
as an essential dimension of h u m a n life. Art was everything made by peo-
ple who were free and found pleasure in their work. In his Romantic-
socialist utopia most of the useful goods are produced by hand and possess
an artistic quality, like in skilled handicraft; they have no other reward than
902
creation itself, and are not sold or bought (money does not exist anymore),
but freely given to those who wish or need them.
The main center for the elaboration of this kind o f Marxism in the twen-
tieth century has been Germany. Each in his or her way, Rosa Luxemburg.
G. Luk~ics, E. Bloch, and the Frankfurt School (particularly Walter Benja-
min and Marcuse), have integrated into their Marxist theory elements of
the Romantic tradition. 24 Through Herbert Marcuse, this semi-Romantic
Marxist critique of industrial civilization has had a deep impact on con-
temporary Germany and the United States influencing not only the New
Left and the Student Movement of the sixties but also (in a more diffuse
and indirect way) more recent social movements like ecology, feminism,
and pacifism. Therefore, far from being an anachronistic ideology of the
last century, the "warm stream" of Marxism has reached its highest tide
precisely in our times, and particularly in England, Germany and the Unit-
903
Conclusion
Notes
1. Marx, Engels, Uber Kunst und Litteratur (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Henschel, 1948), 231.
2. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin Books, 1982 (1854)), 48, 86, 89, 238, 304. See
also 129: elected to the Parliament, Thomas Gradgrind becomes one of those "respected
members for ounce weights and measures, one of the representatives of the multiplica-
tion table, one of the deaf honourable gentlemen, dumb honourable gentlemen, blind
honourable gentlemen, lame honourable gentlemen, dead honourable gentlemen, to ev-
ery other consideration."
3. Ibid., 192, 240. See also 108: "not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me
the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the
decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse" that is alive in the worker's souls.
4. C. Dickens, Hard Times, 65, 275.
5. Ibid., 102, 194, 283. The hero of the novel, the worker Stephen Blackpool, falls down
into such a pit - the "Old Hell Shaft" - and dies.
6. Ibid., 65, 67.
904
7. John Ruskin, Introduction to A joy for ever, 1857, in Readings from Ruskin (Leipzig:
Velhagen und Klosing, 1925), 91, 93, 96, 102.
8. Ibid., 93, 100, 102.
9. Karl Marx, Capital (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), vol. 1,457-458.
10. Marx, Engels, AusgewiihlteBriefe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 233. On Marx's relation
to Morgan and Maurer see L. Krader, Ethnologie undAnthropologie bei Marx (Frank-
furt: Verlag Ullstein, 1976); on Marx and Niebuhr, see Norman Levine's unpublished
paper "The Eighteenth Century Origins of Historical Materialism."
11. See Karl Mannheim, "Das Konservative Denken," Wissenssoziologie, (Berlin:
Luchterhand, 1964), 425, 438, 440, 486, 497, 504, 507, etc.
12. See E. Fischer, Marx in his own words (London: Penguin Press, 1970), 15; Alvin Gould-
ner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (London: Penguin Press,
1973), 339; M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature, (New York: Norton Library, 1973), 314.
13. In my article "Marxism and revolutionary romanticism," Telos, 49, Fall 1981, I focus
mainly on the common attitude of Marx and the Romantics toward pre-capitalist socie-
ties. I take up the general concept of "romantic anti-capitalism" (first formulated by
Luk~ics) in my paper (with R. Sayre) "Figures of Romantic anti-capitalism," New Ger-
man Critique, 32, Spring-Summer 1984, but this essay does not discuss Marx.
14. Karl Marx, National (gkonomie und Philosophie, 1844, in Die Friihschriften, ed. S.
Landshut (Stuttgart: Kr6ner Verlag, 1953), 240, 243,255, 299, 301, 303. See also in the
Communist Manifesto the reference to the drowning by capitalism of all ancient values
in "the icy water of egotistical calculation" (in Marx, The Revolution of 1848, Penguin
Books, 1973, 70).
15. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 344. See also 385 on the significance of machinery for the Greek
poet Antipatros: to give freedom to the slaves and bring back the Golden Age - as op-
posed to the modern employment of machines to enslave the workers and expand the
value of capital.
16. Marx, Capital, vol. 1,330, 340-341, 398, 401, 474; and Grundrisse (London: Penguin
Books, 1973), 247.
17. Marx, Grundrisse, 173, 611, 706, 708-712.
18. Marx, Die Fr~ihsehriften, 248.
19. Political Writings of William Morris, edited by A. L. Morton (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1979), 243.
20. W. Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977 (1890)),
276-279.
21. W. Morris, "Useful Work Versus Useless Toil," 1884 in Political Writings, 102-103.
22. W. Morris, News from Nowhere, 274-275, 280.
23. Patriarchalism is not necessarily linked to the Romantic world-view: it may as well be
found among Rationalists and Positivists (such as A. Comte himself). Moreover, there
are many feminist thinkers among the Romantic socialists, from Fourier to Marcuse.
24. See my articles "Marcuse and Benjamin: the Romantic Dimension," Telos, 44, Summer
1980, and "Marxism and Revolutionary Romanticism," Telos, 49, Fall 1981.